![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/84\/2012\/08\/Dragon-Map.jpg\" "\\"Dragon-Map\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nSo, JT asked<\/a>:<\/p>\n 3. You undoubtedly have a logical proof of some sort for a moral lawgiver. What is it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No, I definitely don\u2019t have a modus tollens, modus ponens style justification for my new position. I didn\u2019t have one for my old position, and I doubt JT\u2019s got one for his metaphysics. \u00a0As the name suggests, metaphysics are hard to test.<\/p>\n So I end up approaching the problem from both sides. \u00a0I look for things I\u2019m really confident in or that I\u2019m willing to presuppose (e.g. other minds exist, arbitrary murder is wrong, the worth of my life is at least within an order of maginitude of the worth of any randomly chosen human). \u00a0These are first principles, and they\u2019re pretty hard to prove (logically or otherwise). \u00a0I\u2019ll try and knock out a slightly less scattered list at some point in the future.<\/p>\n Imagine I\u2019m trying to map out the ocean floor. \u00a0These first principles are my soundings of depth. \u00a0They may not be taken in a very systematic way, and there may be regions where I\u00a0can\u2019t<\/em> take any soundings at all (the water\u2019s too dangerous, my rope\u2019s too short, etc). \u00a0But this is the dataset I want any proposed map of the ocean floor to match.<\/p>\n The trouble is, I can end up with a lot of possible maps that satisfy these conditions. \u00a0So now I start making some judgements about what a\u00a0good<\/em>\u00a0map looks like. \u00a0Maybe good<\/em> maps of the ocean floor don\u2019t have jump discontinuities. \u00a0Maybe good\u00a0<\/em>maps are self-similar at a lot of different scales. \u00a0This helps me pare down the list of possible maps, but the\u00a0good<\/em> map criterion is also hard to prove. \u00a0Some of it is aesthetic, though I might also notice that certain principles of\u00a0good<\/em> maps do better than others at anticipating\u00a0future<\/em> soundings.<\/p>\n And that brings me to one of the biggest ways the ocean floor analogy isn\u2019t a great stand-in for \u201cHow do you pick a metaphysics?\u201d \u00a0When we\u2019re talking about moral philosophy, we start out with soundings in a lot of places. \u00a0There isn\u2019t much uncharted moral territory (by which I mean, places where we don\u2019t have a preference between two outcomes or courses of actions). \u00a0And some of the uncharted spots are boring<\/em> and unhelpful<\/a>. \u00a0 \u00a0(Is \u201cthere are two identical twins unconscious in a pool and you can only save one, which one?\u201d really going to help you distinguish between competing metaethical theories, or is it going to burn through working memory energy to little use?).<\/p>\n Sometimes, the closest I can get to\u00a0new<\/em> soundings is moral questions I change my mind about. \u00a0Let\u2019s say I used to prefer X, and now I prefer not-X, and I\u2019ve been considering two metaethical systems: A and A\u2019, which output as correct \u2018X\u2019 and \u2018not-X\u2019 respectively. \u00a0Now that I\u2019ve changed my mind, I should increase my expectation that A\u2019 is true, since it was right before I was. \u00a0(Note, this doesn\u2019t work if you\u2019ve adopted not-X\u00a0because\u00a0<\/em>you became convinced A\u2019 is likely. \u00a0That way lies a feedback loop and madness).<\/p>\n And, at the abstract level at which I\u2019m writing this<\/em> post, that\u2019s how Catholicism won me over. \u00a0It matched a lot of the soundings I\u2019d already taken, it predicted some measurements I later found myself having to revise, and it looked like a tolerably good map. \u00a0It seemed like a better map than my virtue-ethics atheism. \u00a0I suspect the place where JT and I disagree the most is not about the\u00a0good<\/em> map criteria, but about the moral soundings dataset I was trying to match up to a plausible map.<\/p>\n Now, some people will say, why choose a map at all? \u00a0Why not just plot all the soundings and use\u00a0that<\/em>? \u00a0(This is the \u201cWhy truck with metaethics?\u201d objection). \u00a0There are a couple of reasons. \u00a0First of all, when you\u00a0pare off all the most uncertain bits, but the tattered map you\u2019ve got left isn\u2019t always going to be of much use. \u00a0It\u2019s good to come up with some kind of schema for thinking about the gaps; you probably aren\u2019t indifferent between all possible depths.<\/p>\n Second, there\u2019s something else I need to add to this analogy to make it resemble moral philosophy a little more closely. \u00a0Imagine you\u2019re checking ocean depths with\u00a0a really sucky rope<\/em>. \u00a0I don\u2019t just mean that your observations are a little noisy (though they are) but there\u2019s a whole list of only recently-known failure modes for your instrument<\/a>\u00a0(and we\u2019re not particularly confident that we\u2019ve sussed out all of them). \u00a0Thinking at the map level might make it easier to spot when your observations are buggy. \u00a0You don\u2019t want to take all your observations at face value.<\/p>\n Finally, it\u2019s easier to have a discussion\/debate with someone at the level of maps (and goodness of maps) than it is at the level of intuition datasets. \u00a0Stirrings of conscience are an internal process; your interlocutor can\u2019t watch you measure out fathoms of rope. \u00a0So it\u2019s easier to thrash things out when you can switch back and forth fluidly between predictions and theory (often using thought experiments<\/a>).<\/p>\n